While we were talking to friends at the Meow Wolf "House of Eternal Return" opening in Santa Fe during the spring of 2016, Neil Gaiman pointed at me and said: "Geoff and I go back as far as it goes."

We met at an uptight, pompous, and hypocritical British "public" school in Greater London when we were ten years old. Neil doesn't remember the place with quite as much disdain as I do, but then he was busy losing himself in hefty science fiction tomes at the time. I wrote, somewhat briefly, about our school days in my first memoir, Rock Star: Adventures of a Meteorite Man, and again in my second memoir, My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books and I dare say I will continue to rail against that sorry and savage institution in future works. I have, in fact, been repeatedly encouraged to write a whole book about our schooldays -- a la Raold Dahl's wonderful memoir, Boy.

There is a scene in Dream Dangerously, illustrated by one of my own comic strips, in which I imitate one of our nastier teachers who -- after catching Neil and me drawing comics at the back of class -- yells at us: "Gaiman and Notkin! Comics are rubbish. You two will never amount to anything!"

Forty-five years on, after starting a punk band together at age fifteen, both going into the comic business and, later, both going into film and television production, we are still pals. So much so that Neil advised the producers of his official documentary, Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously that they "couldn't finish the film without talking to Geoff." And what a treat it was to be talked to.

Dream Dangerously contains numerous scenes of book signings, interviews, and other similar interiors. So, after receiving a call from producer and cinematographer, Jordan Rennert, I suggested making a dramatic change by filming my segments in the deep desert. Jordan was full of enthusiasm. "It'll make a wonderful contrast to the scenes we filmed in Terry Pratchett's garden!" he exclaimed.

On New Year's Eve 2015/16, I took Jordan, his friend and colleague Henry Barajas, and a small production crew consisting of my cinematorgrapher Christian B. Meza and location photographer Jane MacArthur, out into the screaming wilderness. After that, Jane and I, and fellow television producer Eric Schumacher went to see the new Star Wars movie. It was a spectacular way in which to spend the final day of 2015.

"Seeing the film is, for me, like
looking at a map of Neil's life and,
by extension, our lives"

We did more filming a couple of days later and I felt an immediate kinship with this crew that had spent years making a documentary about my oldest friend. I became more involved with Dream Dangerously, eventually receiving an executive producer credit. What is it like watching, commenting upon, and being part of a documentary film about someone you have known for nearly your entire life? It is intriguing and slightly schizophrenic:

Here is the person I grew up with in familiar situations.

Here is the person I grew up with in completely unfamiliar situations.

Then I think about how much trouble we used to get into at school and how Neil eventually became one of the most celebrated writers of our generation ... in spite of school. Seeing the film is, for me, like looking at a map of Neil's life and, by extension, our lives. The map is drawn by someone else, but someone who knows the land really well.

Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously European premiere poster

On Saturday, I shall be at the charming and elegant Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, for the Southwestern theatrical premiere of Dream Dangerously. The theater is owned by famed fantasy and science fiction writer George R.R. Martin, who is also a long-time friend of Neil's. George and I go pretty far back too, though not in the same way; I'm not a Johnny-come-lately Game of Thrones fan. I discovered Sandkings and Fevre Dream in the early 1980s and have been a "GRRM" enthusiast ever since. Following the screening, George, Patrick, Jordan, and I will participate in a live Q&A and it will be interesting to share anecdotes about Neil, as we all know him best through different parts of the same life.

Dream Dangerously officially releases today, Friday, July 8 on Vimeo and you can watch the trailer or purchase the film here. In a rather brilliant promotional idea, the producers organized free screenings of the film at comic shops and bookshops around the country on Saturday, July 9. I love this! Neil and I were teenage punk rockers and there is something very punk rock do-it-yourself about organizing a one-day "tour" of free showings at indie comic shops. After all, our roots are in comic books. Next month, I take the film to Scotland, where we will present the European premiere of Dream Dangerously at The New Town Theatre on August 12, procued by The New Wee Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Interestingly enough, New Town is just down the street from one of the locations in the film.

I said to Patrick: "The highest compliment I can give is to say that your film shows the Neil that I know." Brilliant Neil, funny Neil, sometimes quiet and mild-mannered Neil who scrupulously makes time for his fans. All of them. To the extent that -- in the film -- you see him immersing his hands in a giant bucket of ice to try and relieve the pain and cramps from signing all those books. Neil's life reads a bit like one of his own fairytales for grownups. And I was never more proud of anyone.

Last week I was in Boston. In a bookshop on Newbury Street I saw a hardback edition of Neil's latest book -- his nonfiction collection -- The View from the Cheap Seats, which includes the moving Introduction he wrote for my own Rock Star memoir. An impressive stack of copies sat grandly on the New Releases table. Cheap Seats had been placed next to a recent Kurt Vonnegut edition. I took a photo of the adjacent covers and posted it on Twitter. The caption read: "Gaiman and Notkin! You two will never amount to anything ... apart from being next to Vonnegut."

Few of us have the opportunity to follow through on those whimsical childhood dreams such as: "I want to be an astronaut, fireman, lion tamer, or cartoonist." I am one of the lucky ones. I followed through on more than one and, although traveling into space has, thus far, eluded me I have not yet given up. More on that in the future.

Like many boys, I hoped and imagined I might become an astronaut, but I also dreamed of finding rocks from space and drawing cartoons. While I habitually blame both my parents for my obsession with meteorites (Dad was an amateur astronomer; Mother fueled my passion for visits to the Natural History Museum, London), my late mother must fully accept the blame for my life-long love affair with comics. Well, her and my old friend Neil Gaiman.

Mom first gave me comic books in order to distract me, and this first occurred immediately after my younger brother, Andrew was born. It is my understanding that Mother felt comics would keep my science and science fiction-hungry child brain occupied so she could fuss over the newborn infant.

"If [Mother] had known the far-reaching repercussions of that gift, I believe she may have presented me with an Enid Blyton or Dr. Seuss volume instead (she did try, later, to wean me off comics and onto Zane Grey and Edgar Allan Poe, with only marginal success) . . . She was not exactly against comics, but I believe she saw them as fodder for the feeble-minded and expected me to spend my time reading material of a more intellectual flavor."

At the age of ten I was sent to a humorless and overly strict, all-boys British public school where I almost immediately met Neil Gaiman. He was the first person I knew who was as fixated upon four-color comics as I. Our shared love of the medium fostered a decades-long friendship that continues to this day. Neil was my very first stop on a kaleidoscopic journey through comicdom that would be filled with mad coincidence, adventure, and good fortune. Over the coming years I encountered, befriended, and worked with Spirit creator Will Eisner, Mad magazine co-founder Harvey Kurtzman, Pulitzer prize-winning creator of Maus, Art Spiegelman, and so many other comics luminaries they could fill a book. Which they did.

My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books was born out of a wistful desire to revisit and remember my earlier career as a cartoonist and associate editor of Raw Books & Graphics -- a leading avant garde comic publisher in New York City during the 1980s. The book was written on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and departure lounges, and other places where peripatetic people gather and wait, during the spring of 2015, as I hurried around the world -- myself appearing, I imagine, much like a winged (or at least, flighty) cartoon character -- in pursuit of my current career as science writer, television host, producer, and public speaker.

In the spirit of underground comics, and Raw magazine, and micropress runs of the funny little indie comics I loved, I wanted my comics memoir -- my third book and perhaps my most personal work -- to come to life with the care and minute idiosyncrasies that only a handcrafted edition can know. To that end, the initial print run is limited to just 250 copies, each of which is signed and numbered and carries an exclusive tipped-in color panel on the inside front cover. There will be another edition later, I suppose, that will be born on big automated presses and carry an ISBN number but, like a site-specific art installation, or a guerilla play that is only performed once, this special edition has a personal and handcrafted touch that feels to me more like artifact that publication.

"The more we as a society move towards a digital and instantly reproducible, short-attention-span world, the more those of us who care about such matters will yearn for, and appreciate, the dwindling craft of making actual things."

The book will be published on Halloween 2015 and the launch event will be at the Tucson Science Fiction Convention (TusCon), where I will surely be surrounded by like-minded people who, with their lovingly-made cosplay costumes and adored comic book collections, fully understand and appreciate what it means to make something carefully, slowly, and entirely out of love.

"There are other creative types — film directors and singer/songwriters for example — who must master multiple talents, but cartooning is a solitary profession and there is no artist who walks quite so alone, and with quite so many tools in his bag as the cartoonist"